John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies

Published: August 13, 1992

Correction Appended

(Page 2 of 3)

John Milton Cage Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, and spent part of his childhood in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich., before moving back to California. An entrepreneur from the start, he had his own weekly radio show on KNX in Los Angeles when he was 12 years old. He had started to study the piano by then, and his programs featured his own performances and those by other musicians in his Boy Scout troop. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as class valedictorian.

He was ambivalent about his musical studies at first. He did not regard himself as a virtuoso pianist, and throughout his life he frankly spoke and wrote of his lack of traditional musical skills, going as far as proclaiming, in his book "A Year From Monday": "I can't keep a tune. In fact I have no talent for music."

In 1930, after two years at Pomona College, Mr. Cage went to Paris where he briefly worked for Erno Goldfinger, an architect with ties to Marcel Duschamp and other Dadaists whose work would later influence him. He also threw himself into the study of contemporary piano works he had heard at a performance by the American pianist John Kirkpatrick. He painted and wrote poetry, and it was during a visit to Majorca during this first European sojourn that he composed his first piano pieces. Working as a Cook And Gardener

The European trip was followed in 1931 by a drive across the United States. When he returned to California, he took jobs as a cook and gardener. He also began giving lectures on modern art, keeping a step ahead of his subject by doing research at the Los Angeles Public Library.

At around this time, he also was becoming increasingly interested in the music of Schoenberg, who had jettisoned the hierarchical system of tonal harmony that had prevailed in Western music, and replaced it with a system in which the 12 tones of the scale were given equal weight. This notion appealed to Mr. Cage, and in 1933, after reading that the pianist Richard Buhlig performed some of Schoenberg's music, he sought Buhlig out and began to study with him. He also developed a harmonic system of his own, distinct from Schoenberg's, but similar in spirit, and used it to compose a Sonata for Two Voices and a Sonata for Clarinet.

Later in 1933, Mr. Cage traveled to New York City to study harmony and composition with Adolph Weiss. He also studied Oriental and folk music at the New School for Social Research with the iconoclastic composer Henry Cowell.

By the time Mr. Cage returned to California, late in 1934, Schoenberg had left Europe, where the Nazis had declared his music decadent, and had accepted a teaching post at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. Schoenberg agreed to teach Mr. Cage counterpoint, harmony and analysis free of charge, as long as Mr. Cage promised to consecrate himself to music.

"Schoenberg was a marvelous person," Mr. Cage said last month. "He gave his students little comfort. When we followed the rules in writing counterpoint, he would say, 'Why don't you take a little liberty?' And when we took liberties, he would say, 'Don't you know the rules?' "

But Schoenberg showed little interest in Mr. Cage's own work. He declined to look at his pieces, even such formal exercises as fugues. And when Mr. Cage's early percussion works were performed, Schoenberg invariably said he was not able to attend.

Eventually, Mr. Cage drifted toward the world of dance. In 1937, he joined the modern dance ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles as an accompanist and composer, and he formed his own ensemble to play his early percussion works. In 1937, he moved to Seattle, where he worked as composer and accompanist for Bonnie Baird's dance classes at the Cornish School. While in Seattle, he organized another percussion band, collected unusual instruments and toured the Northwest. It was also at this time that he met and began his lifelong collaboration with Merce Cunningham.

He returned to California in 1938 to join the faculty of Mills College. His works of this period were still fairly conventional, at least by his later standards. His "Music for Wind Instruments" and "Metamorphosis" (both 1938) showed a continuing allegiance to Schoenberg's 12-tone system, and his "First Construction" (1939), for a percussion ensemble that used sleigh bells, thunder sheets and brake drums, explored layers of interlocking rhythms.

But Mr. Cage was also beginning to explore new territory. His "Imaginary Landscape No. 1," composed in 1939, used variable-speed turntables, a muted piano and a cymbal. The next year he wrote his first piece for prepared piano, "Bacchanale."

In 1942, after brief stays in San Francisco and Chicago, Mr. Cage moved to New York City, which remained his home base thereafter. He again assembled a percussion group, which gave its first New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1943. The concert received a great deal of attention, not all of it favorable. Among the listeners who objected to Mr. Cage's eclectic instrumental arsenal, which included flower pots, cow bells and frequency oscillators, was Noel Straus, whose review in The New York Times said Mr. Cage's music "had an inescapable resemblance to the meaningless sounds made by children amusing themselves by banging on tin pans and other resonant kitchen utensils."

Correction: August 15, 1992, Saturday Because of an editing error, an obituary on Thursday about the composer John Cage characterized his music incorrectly. Though some of his works could be described as Minimalist and though Mr. Cage influenced the Minimalist movement in music and art, his works defied formal classification and were often intentionally chaotic.